Metal-organic frameworks are a diverse family of materials but, as recognised in the recent Nobel Prize, offer striking opportunities to design in space. In this seminar I will discuss recent work in my group in harnessing this to realise new magnetic states, challenging to realise in classical, dense inorganic magnetic materials.

I will discuss our work on two-dimensional van der Waals metal organic magnets (MCl2L), where we controlled structure and interactions to realise a range of different properties, from routes towards the Haldane S = 2 quantum chain[1] to controllable non-collinear ferromagnetism.[2]

In addition to providing control over interactions in existing structure types, MOFs also exhibit a diversity of topologies, and hence magnetic phases, not previously discovered. I will discuss our computational work showing that there are high symmetry topologies that would produce new spin liquid states, which could be realised in MOFs[3] together with our on-going experimental efforts to use neutron scattering to uncover new magnetic states in MOF glasses[4] and four dimensional lattices.

[1] J. Pitcairn et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 145, 1783 (2023)
[2] J. Pitcairn et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 146, 19146 (2024)
[3] J. Paddison & M. Cliffe, ACS Cent. Sci. 10, 1821 (2024)
[4] L. León-Alcaide et al., Nat. Commun. 16, 8783 (2025)

Bio
Matthew Cliffe is an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy (www.cliffegroup.co.uk). Previously he was an Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham in the School of Chemistry and Junior Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge, where he worked with Prof. Clare Grey. He currently holds a ERC Starting Grant (UKRI Guarantee) and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Inorganic Chemistry.tbc